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Colette Voltaire
|death= |parents= Master of Paris |relatives= |children= |marital status= }} Colette Voltaire is one of the numerous offspring of the Master of Paris and, when first introduced to the reader, serves in his intelligence division. While her father has used cybernetics to radically extend his lifespan (200 years at a minimum), Colette gives every indication of being her apparent age of thirty or so. She first appears in the "canon" on page 079 of Act 02 Volume 02, wherein she gives her father a brief report on Agatha's arrival in Paris. Following Agatha's audience with the Master, Colette is to be Agatha's designated guide and research assistant minder while the latter woman is in Paris. Colette's first name is used in-strip for the first time by one of her siblings as but it had been long known from her appearance in The Works (see below.) She unsurprisingly had adventurous dealings with Gil and Wooster when the latter two were students in Paris. She also knows Tarvek, presumably from the same period, and is friends with Seffie von Blitzengaard, or at least as much as two women in their social position can be. She has an unwanted horde of romantic admirers, including for a time Jiminez Hoffmann. Heir to a City It is eventually revealed that the Master has been training/testing Colette to be able to take over his position as leader of Paris (and human interface with the city). The Master’s motivations for this are never specifically stated, but he that he is nearing the end of his painfully-extended lifespan and/or ability to maintain control of his ever-growing city. For this purpose, Colette has had a data-port placed into her neck that allows her to connect to the city mainframe, granting her control over some of the systems. At first, she is not very good at this process, or at least states that the Master has much greater capabilities than she does. (Although at the time she says this, the city's systems have been infiltrated and disrupted by Drusus Beausoleil.) On the positive(?) side, she has managed to learn things about the city that her father did not teach her, and while she is not a Spark when she first appears, in the process of emergency with the city's systems while assisting Simon in his fight against the resurrected Andronicus Valois, she begins to break through and rapidly assumes greater and greater control of (and physical connection to) said systems. Fortunately, Tarvek is to deal with minor irrelevancies such as making sure she doesn't let herself burn to death. The fight, while successful, proves to be Simon Voltaire's last hurrah, and as he lies dying, he is stabbed in the back by Beausoleil with a specially-prepared sword which completely cuts him off from the city. This attack incidentally stuns Colette, but again with the help of Tarvek and Agatha's mini-Castle clank, she is able to recover and truly become her father's heir, taking complete and direct control of Paris. She all of Beausoleil's clank bodies and, since his physical body is elsewhere, banishes him from the city. She then organizes an successful effort to cleanse the city of The Other's more willing minions, and officially assumes the title Master of Paris. Sadly, in the face of the Other's ongoing threat, and the fact that a sizeable fraction of the city's population has been infected with Slaver Wasps, she declares that her father's utopian policies of open gates and free learning cannot (for now at least) be continued. She orders Paris sealed, and announces that disruptive elements like Agatha and the various members of the Von Blitzengaard family must leave. The Works Long before her arrival in the comic, Colette was included in The Works card game, looking almost identical to her first official appearance. Her epithets in the game are Hero and Spy. Possibly Relevant Outside Information Colette was the surname of the French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. Voltaire was the pen name of the famous French author François-Marie Arouet. Although one might suspect a shoutout to the webcomic Athena Voltaire which was nominated for an Eisner Award, as The Works was published in 2001, and Athena Voltaire made its debut in 2002, this appears unlikely. Category:Voltaire Category:Characters from Paris and vicinity Category:The Works:Hero Category:The Works:Spy